News Categories

Partners

The Pioneer
Fund, the Behavioral Sciences, and the Media's False Stories

by HARRY F. WEYHER,
The Pioneer Fund, New York, NY, USA

Since World War I, political controversies have
complicated the long-standing "nature vs. nurture" debate, especially
the question of the source of the observed mean difference in intelligence
between whites and blacks. The Pioneer Fund, one of the only nonprofit
foundations making grants for study and research into human individual and race
differences, along with many of the scientists it has funded, has been widely
and unfairly attacked in the media, often with false charges. In this editorial,
the president of Pioneer provides a unique perspective on some of the
controversies.--Matt Nuenke

The false charge of racism is simply a tactic to
choke off rational discussion, a strategy of intimidation to silence expression
. . . It is based on a shrewd calculation of the moral cowardice of man . . .
fearful of becoming the target of such abuse.--Sidney Hook

Imagine it's the 21st century. UNESCO has commissioned
scholars around the world to summarize the state of knowledge in every
discipline. Their summaries will be placed on the Worldwide Web for use by the
emerging global information society. You have been appointed to head the
committee preparing the Web pages on: Adoption Studies; Behavioral Genetics;
Brain Size and IQ; Crime and IQ; Cultural Bias and Cultural Fairness; Cultural
Differences; Demographics and Fertility; Dysgenics and Eugenics; Employment and
IQ; Gifted and Talented Children; Group Differences; Heritability, Heredity, and
Environment; Intelligence and Individual Differences; the Jensen Effect;
Personality and Temperament; Population and the Environment; Race Differences;
Reaction Time and IQ; Sex Differences; Sociology of Intelligence; Spearman's
Hypothesis; Twin and Kinship Studies.

In the computer literature search provided to your
committee you find no mention of the following:

# John
C. Flanagan's pioneering Air Corps study that later evolved into the famous
Project TALENT, an on-going follow-up investigation of the vocational attitudes,
abilities, and career objectives of more than 400,000 US high school students.

# Thomas
J. Bouchard, Jr. and his colleagues David T. Lykken, Matthew McGue, Nancy L.
Segal, and Auke Tellegen's Minnesota Twin Project showing that identical twins
reared apart are far more similar than are fraternal twins reared together in
IQ, personality, vocational interest, religiosity, and at times remarkably
alike, even to the names of their spouses, children or pets.

# Arthur
R. Jensen's documentation of the failure of compensatory education programs to
raise either school achievement or IQ scores, his demonstration that culture
bias is not a factor affecting relative IQ test performance in the US, and his
confirmation of Charles Spearman's hypothesis that the differences in average IQ
score between blacks and whites are greatest on the most g-loaded subtests.

# Hans
J. Eysenck's post-1980s work promoting the trait approach to personality; his
post-1980s development and use of the University of London Twin Register to
demonstrate the heritability of intelligence, personality, and social attitudes;
and much of his research program on the biological basis of intelligence (as
summarized in his posthumous book Intelligence: The New Look).

# Lloyd
G. Humphreys's continuing work on mathematical giftedness and commensurate
levels of socio-economic status, on the construct of general intelligence, and
on the validity of achievement and ability tests as predictors of life outcomes
for both blacks and whites.

# Philip
E. Vernon, Richard Lynn, and J. Philippe Rushton's demonstration that East
Asians, both in their homelands and as immigrants, obtain average IQ scores
above those of Europeans and European-Americans; Rushton's further demonstration
that a similar pattern applies worldwide, not only for cognitive test scores,
but for over 60 behavioral and physical traits.

# Jensen
and Rushton's finding that the most g-loaded IQ subtests are also the most
heritable, and that the amount of inbreeding depression as measured on IQ tests
of Japanese in Japan predicts the amount of regression to the mean and the
amount of difference between blacks and whites in the US.

#
Jensen, Lynn, Rushton, and P.A. Vernon's finding that brain size is related to
IQ score, including use of state-of-the-art Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
techniques; Jensen and Vernon's finding that the relationship between brain size
and IQ holds within-families (among siblings) as well as between-families;
Rushton's series of studies showing the oriental-white-black gradient in average
brain size parallels the one in mean IQ.

#
Garrett Hardin's extension of his "Tragedy of the Commons" and
"Living on a Lifeboat" metaphors to questions of the environment,
population size, and immigration policy.

# Audrey
Shuey's compilation of what has become the standard sourcebook of every major
study of intelligence scores among African-Americans (later updated by Frank C.J.
McGurk and R. Travis Osborne); McGurk's finding that the racial gap on IQ scores
has not lessened for later generations with the narrowing of the socioeconomic
gap.

#
Rushton and Osborne's demonstration that heritability estimates are about the
same for different groups in the US.

# Robert
A. Gordon's evidence that the IQ requirements of daily activities produce
differential rates across populations of undesirable social outcomes such as
crime, poverty, and HIV infection, thereby intensifying racial politics.

#
Finally, Linda S. Gottfredson's work showing how the effects of intelligence
level pervade everyday life, and tracing dilemmas in social policy that arise
from individual and group mean differences in intelligence, such as that between
racial representativeness and competence in police hiring.

All this research missing? Are you the lead character
in a special 21St century re-make of The Twilight Zone? Has a politically
correct supercomputer purged the database of all potentially "sensitive and
disturbing" information?

No, you're simply looking at what the state of
knowledge in behavioral sciences would be today, minus things funded by or
associated with the Pioneer Fund and the scientists it has supported. This
is critical research by world-class scholars, much of which was published in
this journal, and was landmark research which probably would not have been
funded by government agencies or the larger foundations. Yet, if one were to
believe some important segments of the media, this research was funded by an
evil foundation and done by evil scientists, and is unfit for public
dissemination.

I am told that it is unusual for a non-academic to be
asked to write an editorial for "Intelligence." I hope to
justify the editor's granting me standing here by giving the readers an inside
view of what the Pioneer Fund really is, what it most certainly is not, and how
its grantees have helped shape the face of the behavioral sciences as we know
them today. While it is a labor of love to recount the foregoing, I think it is
my duty also to review especially the mistreatment Pioneer and many of its
grantees have received in the media.

"FEEDING FRENZY" AND
"BLOOD SPORT"--THE FALSE AND MALICIOUS CHARGES AGAINST THE PIONEER
FUND

"When the facts are not on your side, argue a
point of law; when the law is not on your side, argue the facts; when neither
the facts nor the law is on your side, attack the character of your
opponent!"

I first heard that "trick of the trade,"
which of course is not in the law books, back when I was a student at Harvard
Law School years ago. I'm sure it goes back long before that, maybe to the
ancient Greeks. Given human nature, such a tactic can be expected occasionally
in our legal system, which by definition is an adversarial contest between
advocates for opposing parties. But in our legal system you also have a
presiding judge and courts of appeal, who, in theory at least, work to keep the
contest free of such tricks and within the agreed upon rules.

The world of science has a different set of rules that
governs contests between opposing attempts to explain nature--statistical
testing against alternative hypotheses, peer review, and independent replication
of results.

But in the world of journalism, or at least a large
part of it, there are no effective means of enforcing rules against unethical
and misleading practices. Thus, journalism has persisted in following the
"egalitarian orthodoxy," a credo described by Garrett (1961) and now
called "political correctness" or "P.C.," which among many
other things denies or downplays the possibility of genetic influence on race,
sex, and individual differences in psychological traits (personality, ability,
interests, etc.) (Rushton, 1994). Journalistic media persist in this orthodoxy
despite the fact, as will be pointed out later, that the bulk of the evidence
points to the opposite conclusions, and virtually all scientists, contrary to
the media's assertions, agree that some genetic influence exists.

In addition to the P.C. orthodoxy, a second force
propels some parts of the media into false reporting. That is the common tabloid
ethic that says anything goes that sells papers or boosts ratings. Thus this
sector of the media can kill two birds with one stone: push its own P.C.
position of genetic equality and simultaneously generate reader excitement by
personal attacks on scientists who have merely published their findings
honestly, and also attacks on the funder of research by those scientists.

The misrepresentation of the Pioneer Fund and the
scientists it has supported--including some of the most cited and honored in
their respective fields, and the research they have conducted, research that
almost certainly would not have been funded by Federal agencies or other
foundations--is revealing. It shows the inability and, in many cases, deliberate
unwillingness of much of a politicized media industry, print and even more so
electronic, to play by any set of fair rules. Instead, media play as if in a
"blood sport" or in a "feeding frenzy," to invoke the titles
of two books (Sabato, 1991; Stewart, 1996) documenting how the substantive
shallowness, banality, and irrelevance of attack journalism have tragically
transformed the dissemination of information in our society.

Abusive media treatment of scientists in these fields
has long existed, and it may be worse than ever today. There was a furious and
unfair media attack on Jensen in 1969 and Eysenck in 1971 (Pearson, 1997, pp.
18-58). But the media furors in the late 1980s and early 1990s over Gottfredson,
Gordon, Rushton, Michael Levin, William Shockley, Edward 0. Wilson, Richard
Herrnstein, and Charles Murray, seem to have become even worse.

Exactly what is this "political
correctness," which dictates the abuse of scientists? One dictionary
defines it as: "orthodox liberal opinion on matters of sexuality, race, .
. .; usually used disparagingly to connote dogmatism, excessive sensitivity
to minority causes. . . . (Webster's New World Dictionary of American
English, 1994)

Newsweek said on 24 December 1990 in a cover
story: "P.C. is Marxist in origin, in the broad sense of attempting to
redistribute power from the privileged class (white males) to the oppressed
masses. It represents the values of social equality and social justice over that
of free speech."

P.C. is commonly associated with the generations of
campus radicals who grew up in the 1960s and have now achieved positions of
academic influence as well as high positions in the media industry.

Sadly, the media's adherence to P.C. includes also a
widespread ban on publishing materials about individual or racial differences in
intelligence, even where the materials represent the mainstream of scientific
thought. Pioneer witnessed this as early as the 1950s, when publishers refused
Shuey's landmark book on Negro intelligence (Shuey, 1958, 1966), forcing her to
go to private printers and private distribution. Nearly half a century later
Jensen, in the opinion of many the world's leading expert on mental ability,
submitted his manuscript The g Factor, a truly landmark book on
intelligence, to three major publishing houses in succession. Each of these
initially indicated great interest but then without explanation to him lapsed
into silence for months, neither accepting nor rejecting the book (Murray,
1997), until the long silence forced him each time to go to another publisher
and finally to a smaller one independent of P.C. pressures.

Similarly, Rushton, Levin, and others have had
difficulty in finding publishers. Christopher Brand actually was "depublished,"
with his book being withdrawn by the publisher a few days after publication.
Murray (1997) in looking at this behavior, said that publishing houses,
"have come to see themselves not as deliverers of great scholarship to the
world, but as gatekeepers for the politically correct. (p. 40)"

Evidence of media misbehavior? Case
histories? Yes, and here they are given below.

The Jensen Case: A furor erupted over the
monograph by Jensen (1969) in the Harvard Educational Review entitled
"How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" Jensen, who had
not been funded by Pioneer, argued that the evidence supported the following
propositions: (1) IQ tests measure a general-ability dimension of great social
relevance; (2) individual differences on this dimension have a high
heritability; (3) compensatory education programs such as Head Start have proved
generally ineffective in changing the relative status of individuals and groups
on this dimension; (4) social mobility is linked to ability, so social-class
differences in IQ likely reflect some genetic component; and (5) black-white
differences in IQ likely reflect some genetic component. The outcry about
Jensen's points included a widespread denunciation throughout the media,
disruptive protests at the University of California, Berkeley, leading to the
necessity for armed escorts, and resolutions passed against Jensen at
professional societies. The Review abruptly suspended sales of the issue
(Jensen, 1972, pp. 24-25). The present writer was one of those whose purchase
order was refused.

The furor over Jensen pulled in Pioneer when some of
Jensen's opponents discovered that Pioneer, although it had not funded Jensen's
research to that point, had funded earlier research into the black-white
intelligence gap. Although this earlier work by Garrett, Shuey, McGurk, and
Osborne had previously attracted less attention than Jensen's Harvard
Educational Review article, Pioneer now was given increasing attention in
the media and linked with research on the politically charged race-IQ issue. The
words "racist" and "Nazi" were thrown about when Pioneer was
the subject and often were copied by others in the "frenzy" journalism
that followed.

The Rushton Case: In 1989 Pioneer found itself
in the midst of a new media furor. At a January meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), psychology Professor J.
Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario presented his research on
racial evolution that went beyond IQ and showed that Africans and Asians are
consistently at opposite ends of a continuum on over 60 anatomical and social
variables, with Europeans consistently intermediate (Rushton, 1989, 1992). The
variables included brain size, sexual behavior, fertility, personality and
temperament, speed of maturation, and longevity. Rushton, a fellow of the AAAS,
and of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and also a recipient of Pioneer
support, went on to make international headlines. In the media Pioneer was
widely associated with Rushton's supposed evil-doings, and was called
"racist" and "Nazi" in countless news stories. As a result
of the media's hue and cry over Rushton's paper, the premier of Ontario publicly
called for him to be fired, the Ontario Provincial Police threatened him with
incarceration, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission investigated him.

Perhaps worse, Rushton became the target of some of
the University administrators. His dean, a physical anthropologist, publicly
declared that Rushton had lost his scientific credibility, and issued a series
of preemptive statements making plain her negative opinion of him and his work.
Her statements were widely interpreted in the media as a refutation by his
"boss." Next, the chair of Rushton's department gave him an annual
performance rating of "unsatisfactory" citing his
"insensitivity." This was a remarkable turnaround because it occurred
for the same year in which Rushton had been made a Fellow of the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation. His previous 12 years of annual ratings had been
"good" to "excellent," and indeed his earlier
noncontroversial work had made him one of the most cited scholars at his
University. Because unsatisfactory ratings can lead to dismissal, even for a
tenured professor like Rushton, he was forced to contest the rating through
various levels of grievance. As part of his defense Rushton received over 50
strong letters of support from important scholars around the world, many
endorsing the evidence he had presented. One of these, Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr.,
then chair of his department at the University of Minnesota, found Rushton's
performance to be superb on the scale used for his own faculty (Bouchard, 1998).
Rushton eventually won his appeal against the dean and the chair, and two
separate grievance committees chastised them for their actions against him. The
media took little notice of Rushton's victories before the committees. Rushton's
annual performance ratings currently are back to "good" and
"excellent" (Pearson, 1997, pp. 225-257).

The most frightening part of Rushton's story is how
Canada's hate literature laws were used in an attempt to silence him and spike
his research. While in the United States our Founding Fathers gave us the
protection of the First Amendment, this is not so in most of the world. Great
Britain, Canada, Germany, and many other Western European nations have laws
against free speech, ostensibly enacted to inhibit "hate" and the
spreading of "false news." In Rushton's case Canada Customs seized a
copy of his book, Race, Evolution and Behavior, holding it for nine
months while their lawyers read it over to determine if it was "hate
literature."

The potentially chilling effect of hate literature
laws on scientific research goes well beyond the race issue. Scholars in the
social sciences examining any biological or historical question regarding
groups, defined not only by race, but by ethnic identity, sex, age, or sexual
orientation are potential targets. Despite the First Amendment and America's
tradition of academic freedom, the campaign against Rushton in Canada was used
as a jumping off point to attack the academic freedom of Robert Gordon and Linda
Gottfredson in the United States, as described above, and to prevent Pioneer
from funding their research. This was so even though Gottfredson and Gordon have
never taken a position as to the genetic component in race differences, but only
demonstrated the existence of the differences and the pragmatic consequences for
industry and academia, whatever the cause.

The Delaware Case: The foregoing disputes
involving Jensen and Rushton led to investigations or renewed investigations of
Pioneer in varying degrees at the University of Western Ontario in Canada (over
Rushton's research), at the University of London in England (over research by
Eysenck), and at several US institutions, including especially at Smith College
(over work by Seymour W. Itzkoff) and at the University of Minnesota (over twin
studies by Bouchard and others, with accompanying innuendo that Professor Nancy
Segal was making improper use of Holocaust data). But the single biggest
investigation started in October 1989 at the University of Delaware over
research supported by Pioneer on employment qualification tests being carried
out by Gottfredson (1986) and Jan Blits (Blits & Gottfredson, 1990a,b), in
collaboration with Gordon.

Paradoxically, none of the research at Delaware
related to genetics. However, because Pioneer grants had gone to Rushton and a
few others doing research on race and genetic differences, Pioneer's whole
program of grants was considered suspect in some quarters. A professor in the
Linguistics Department at Delaware wrote a letter to the University president
leveling a series of charges against Pioneer, including "racism" and
"Nazism," and citing as support two long-time antihereditarian
activists, Jerry Hirsch and Barry Mehler, a total of 28 times (Frawley, 1989).

The present writer had worked as a young lawyer for
John M. Harlan (later a Justice of the US Supreme Court), one of Pioneer's
founders, and also later became the attorney and close friend of Wickliffe
Preston Draper, another Pioneer founder, and had great admiration for both men.
This writer, therefore, was aghast to read in Frawley's letter and in tracts
written by Mehier and distributed on the Delaware campus, the false claim that
these two men, both war veterans and both highly intelligent and patriotic, had
secretly associated themselves with Nazi sympathizers and racists, and were
furthering a sinister program based on Hitler's precepts (Mehler, 1989,
1989-90).

False or not, the furor led the president of the
University of Delaware to ban further research grants from Pioneer (Blits,
1991). The commotion also led to a series of punitive actions being taken
against Gottfredson and Blits, including the attempted denial of promotions (Colp,
1991; Curley, 1991). When this writer, acting as president of the Pioneer Fund,
wrote letters of protest to the individual trustees of the University, he
received a reply from the chairman that: "No matter whether [racism] is in
fact the orientation of the Pioneer Fund or not, that is perceived as the
orientation of the Fund by at least a material number of our faculty, staff, and
students. Without judging the merits of this perception, the board's objective
of increasing minority presence at the University could . . . be hampered
if the University chose to seek funds from the Pioneer Fund at this time."
(Kirkpatrick, 1990)

Just how far opponents of the Pioneer Fund departed
from reality can be seen in Mehler's remarks regarding the Delaware ban in his
speech at a conference on "What's Wrong With Race Research?" hosted by
the African Students Association during Africa Week at the University of Western
Ontario (Canada) on 8 February 1991, as follows (in language that typified his
style of discourse): "[T]he depression. . . brought us Hitler, who
took these theories to their ultimate conclusion. . , that if you don't got it
in your genes then we got a place for you. We can make you into pillowcases and
lightshades and we can take the gold out of your teeth . . . . Now you
see because the University of Delaware recently decided that they will not
accept the Pioneer Fund money. They said -- in fact they called it "dirty
money" -- that's what they called it -- "dirty money" -- And they
don't want to have anything to do with it . . . . I don't think I have to say
anything more. I keep saying the same point and try to make it in different
ways. We are talking about the foundation for a new fascism. These ideas led to
sterilization, immigration restriction, death camps and breeding farms." (Mehler,
1991, pp. 3, 15)

The ensuing 2 years saw additional harassment of
Gottfredson and Blits by the University, their lodging of formal complaints in
response, and outside bodies coming to their support. The two scientists
prevailed in all hearings before independent panels. The University Faculty
Senate's Committee on Faculty Welfare and Privileges held that Gottfredson and
Blits had been evaluated dishonestly and their academic freedom had been
violated (Committee on Faculty Welfare and Privileges, 199la,b); a national
arbitrator ruled that the University's funding ban "curtailed . . .
academic freedom" and ordered it rescinded (Strongin, 1991); and the
American Association of University Professors announced that such bans violate
academic freedom no less than would prohibiting the research itself (Gorman,
1992). All this resulted eventually in an out-of-court settlement with the
University, one provision being a year's paid leave of absence for both
professors to conduct research (Holden, 1992). Pioneer grants were resumed.

The media treatment of this affair was extensive and
was focused on the banning of Pioneer grants and on the black-white differences
in scores on job qualification tests, seeming to blame the scientists for the
latter findings. Pioneer again was subjected to much name calling for funding
the scientists. Conversely, there was relatively little media acknowledgement of
the eventual outcome in favor of Gottfredson, Blits, and Gordon.

The Bell Curve Case: In 1994 another torrent of
media abuse was unleashed with the simultaneous appearance of three books all
addressing the issues of genetics and IQ: Itzkoff's (1994) The Decline of
Intelligence in America; Rushton's (1995) Race, Evolution, and Behavior; and
Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) The Bell Curve. The first two researchers
were supported, in part, by grants from Pioneer, but Herrnstein and Murray were
not. Malcolm Browne, science writer at the New York limes, reviewed all
three books together in the New York limes Book Review (16 October 1994)
and concluded that "the government or society that persists in sweeping
their subject matter under the rug will do so at its peril."

Some writers did not share the evaluation of the New
York limes Book Review, especially when Pioneer was mentioned. One article
entitled "Professors of HATE" (in 5" letters!) appeared in Rolling
Stone magazine (Miller, 1994). Taking up the entire next page was a
photograph of Rushton's face, darkened and superimposed on a Gothic university
tower -- the overall effect was a sinister portrayal. On the following page a
photograph of Michael Levin, a Pioneer-supported Professor of Philosophy at City
University of New York and the author of Why Race Matters (Levin, 1997),
showed Levin with a darkened beard bending forward across a metal desk into an
eerie blue-green light, almost matching the description of him in the text as
"dress[ed]. . .in a well-worn undershirt" and "coiled, ready to
pounce" (pp. 106, 108). The accompanying story claimed "Pioneer Fund
researchers have promoted many of the same policies for tailoring the gene pool
as did their Nazi precursors" (p. 108). It ended with Pioneer-funded
demographer Daniel R. Vining, who is confined to a wheelchair, saying that under
a Nazi-eugenics policy "I probably would have been exterminated
myself" (p. 114).

In another long piece entitled "The Mentality
Bunker" which appeared in Gentleman's Quarterly (Sedgwick, 1994),
John Sedgwick repeated false stories originated largely by Mehler as if Sedgwick
himself had "uncovered" them, and then stated separately, as if it
were an endorsement, that "historian Barry Mehler sees the Pioneer Fund as
laying a pseudo-rationale for fascism" (p. 231). Photographs were published
in brown tint reminiscent of vintage photos from Hitler's times, and some were
doctored to fit the theme. The Gentlemen 's Quarterly 's photo of
Gottfredson, for example, had been retouched, apparently in an effort to make
her look like a witch.

Although one might think such tabloid treatments would
not be cited by scholars, both articles were reprinted in Jacoby and
Glauberman's (1995) The Bell Curve Debate (pp. 144-178) and have been
cited in books such as Stefancic and Delgado's (1996) No Mercy (pp.
37-44), and Howe's (1997) IQ in Question (pp. 67-68, 77).

The enormous media attention given to The Bell
Curve might have been directed to serve a valuable educational purpose, but
was largely directed to other ends. The book reported original analyzes of
11,878 youths (3,022 of whom were African-American) from the 12-year National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and found that most 17-year-olds with high
scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (black as well as white) went on
to occupational success by their late 20s and early 30s. Many of those with low
scores, on the other hand, went on to welfare dependency. Once more media
criticism of the book focused almost exclusively on the approximately 70 pages
relating to the black-white difference and its probable basis in part in
genetics, out of 850 pages.

The furor led the American Psychological Association (APA)
to establish an 11-person Task Force (Neisser et al., 1996). It accepted the
substantial heritability found for IQ from studies of monozygotic twins reared
apart and other kinship studies. On the origin of the average IQ difference
between races, however, the Task Force concluded, "There is certainly no
[empirical] support for a genetic interpretation." (p. 97). This
conclusion, on its face, is at variance with the survey of expert opinion
conducted by Snyder man & Rothman (1987, 1988) and initially reported in the
American Psychologist, the official journal of the APA.

The findings of Snyderman and Rothman, who surveyed
1,020 persons with mental test expertise from a broad range of disciplines in
the 1980s, never were cited by critics of The Bell Curve. These
findings, after initial publication in the American Psychologist (Snyderman
& Rothman, 1987), were published in a book, The IQ Controversy: The Media
and Public Policy (Snyderman & Rothman, 1988). Of the experts, 53%
agreed that there is a consensus among psychologists and educators as to the
kind of behaviors labeled as "intelligent" (p. 55); 60% agreed
that IQ is an important determinant of socio-economic status (p. 66); 58% agreed
that intelligence is a general ability rather than a multiplicity of separate
faculties (p. 71); a majority agreed that there is a substantial within-group
heritability for intelligence (p. 95); and a plurality agreed that part
of the black-white difference in average IQ is genetic in origin (p. 128) (Snyderman
& Rothman, 1988).

In response to what they felt was an overall
misleading treatment of The Bell Curve by the media, 52 scholars (15 of
whom had received Pioneer support) signed a statement in the Wall Street
Journal (13 December 1994) supporting The Bell Curve's general
position on the IQ controversy and specifically on the average black-white
difference. Later, Gottfredson (1997) served as guest editor of a special issue
of this journal on the subject of "Intelligence and Social Policy," in
which a number of leading researchers (some Pioneer grantees, some not)
dispelled fallacies about the concept, the nature, and the societal importance
of intelligence that appeared in the popular media following the publication of The
Bell Curve.

Pioneer had never funded either Herrnstein or Murray
(who were supported by the Bradley Foundation), but nonetheless Pioneer was
publicly stated to be a source for the book. Lane (1994), now editor and then a
senior editor at The New Republic, stated in the New York Review of
Books that The Bell Curve was not so much about IQ but was really
about race, and relied on "tainted funding" by Pioneer (p. 15).

Lane, a political writer rather than a scientist, was
especially critical of Pioneer-funded Richard Lynn, whose review of the
world-wide literature up to 1990 on IQ in two 1991 issues of Mankind
Quarterly (Lynn 1991a,b) reported that the mean IQ score of blacks in Africa
shown by 11 studies was 70, compared to the mean IQ score of 85 typically found
for African-Americans. The tests used included the Progressive Matrices, Colored
Progressive Matrices, Army Beta, Junior Aptitude, and Culture Fair. Lane's
criticism was repeated, not only in Jacoby and Glauberman's (1995) edited volume
The Bell Curve Debate but also (again by Lane) in the August 1995 issue
of Commentary, an influential journal of opinion (Lane, 1995).

Murray et al. (1995) replied to Lane and his other
critics in this same issue and defended both Pioneer and the accuracy of the
average IQ score of sub-Saharan Africans reported by Lynn. Subsequently Lynn
(1997) has expanded his, review to include seven additional studies published
between 1985 and 1996, two of which were based on more than 1000 blacks aged 15
and 16 and the other five on blacks aged 12-16 or adults. These studies used the
Standard Progressive Matrices, the Colored Progressive Matrices, and the
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Revised). The results were that the
mean IQ scores of the seven samples lay in the range of 58 to 74. These
additional results were consistent with Lynn's earlier estimate that the mean IQ
score of African blacks is a little below 70.

On 22 November 1994, ABC's televised broadcast World
News Tonight with Peter Jennings devoted its feature headed "The
American Agenda," half to The Bell Curve and half to Pioneer.
Partisan scientists, most from extraneous fields, belittled the scientific
research funded by Pioneer. Hitler was portrayed as interested in such science,
and Nazi death camp scenes were shown. The announcer stated that "many
established scientists charge that what the Pioneer Fund pays for is not good
science." Both Murray and this writer refused invitations to be taped for
the show, but file pictures of both were flashed on the screen after the
foregoing, creating the impression that they had been discredited. This
broadcast was subjected to a detailed analysis in an open letter by Robert A.
Gordon dated June 17, 1997, which may be found on the Worldwide Web at
www.pioneerfund.org. Gordon concluded that the ABC News "broadcast was . .
. slick political propaganda tricked up as news" (Gordon, 1997). The
broadcast transcript and Gordon's letter were mailed by Pioneer to 452
journalism schools.

PIONEER, ITS SCIENTISTS, AND THE
MEDIA TODAY AND TOMORROW

Where do such false stories come from? The media
create some, but others originate in academe and may reflect dislike of the idea
that intelligence is heritable, denial of racial differences, desire for
recognition, and the like. Whatever the source, the tabloid segment of the media
loves the stories.

In their 1988 book, Snyderman and Rothman concluded,
not surprisingly, that the news media falsely leave readers and viewers with the
very clear impression that expert opinion is decidedly environmentalist and
anti-testing. Our survey of experts demonstrates that this is not the case. The
news media have allowed themselves to be influenced by a minority of vocal
psychologists and educators whose radical views are consistent with a set of
journalistic values emphasizing human equipotentiality and equality of outcome.
(pp. 233-234)

The Snyderman and Rothman survey was concerned only
with false reporting about the science itself, but the book's conclusion extends
easily to the media's eager grasping at false stories about scientists
personally and their funder.

One embittered scientist told me that, at least as far
as research on race is concerned, the media is on a "search and
destroy" mission. Much of the media accepts the minority radical views
mentioned by. Snyderman and Rothman -- a dislike of the ideas that intelligence
is highly heritable and that races have different average scores. Coupled with
this P.C. view is the desire to "sell papers," or in television and
radio, to gather an audience, or in the case of an individual writer, to make a
"scoop." Little attempt is made in many cases to separate truth from
fiction, and instead there is a rush to publish exciting items which also are
safely on the side of political correctness.

Consider the Peter Jennings broadcast of 22
November 1994 mentioned above. About two weeks earlier, on 9 November, Mehler
faxed an acquaintance as follows: "ABC Evening News with Peter Jennings is
very interested in this story. I have spend [sic] a dozen hours with them
already, including a whole day of shooting and interviewing with Bill Blackmore
[Blakemore]. This is a special project and scheduled for next week Thursday
(although that may change)." (Mehler, 1994)

Thus the outline of the 8-mm "expose" was
set some days before the Peter Jennings staff questioned the persons
named below, who furnished firsthand facts contradicting Mehler. Even though the
truth thus became available before its broadcast, the staff opted to stick to
the more exciting Mehler story.

After the planning period with Mehler, the Peter
Jennings staff taped (but never used except for a few seconds) many hours of
interviews with such scholars as Gordon, Gottfredson, Levin, Rushton, and
perhaps others, but then ignored all their contradictions of Mehler. The staff
also opted to ignore many pages of written answers this writer and other
directors furnished them in response to written questions, along with countless
pages of other materials on Pioneer's history and operations, plus the offer to
put them into contact with many other scientists who had worked with Pioneer
over the years and knew it well. The staff's options were open until the day of
the broadcast, because the staff was still faxing questions to this writer on
that morning.

Moreover, the Peter Jennings staff could have
discovered easily, if they did not already know it, that Mehler has no proof for
his claims of Nazism and the like. He has no original documents or other
credible evidence supporting him, because no such evidence ever existed. He has
never met a single one of Pioneer's 20 directors, and has met only one
Pioneer-funded scientist (briefly on the Geraldo T.V. show and again on
the Donohue T.V. show), and perhaps another (by standing and disrupting
-- with shouts about genocide -- a ceremony honoring Professor Lloyd Humphreys).
In short, Mehler never has had any first-hand knowledge about Pioneer,
nor any non-hearsay proof of his charges. But the Peter Jennings staff
ignored this, and opted to tell the exciting Mehler story -- the false story.

While a few of the media pieces about Pioneer in this
decade have been straightforward, a majority, like the one by Peter Jennings,
parroted the more exciting false charges, and supplemented these with a
sprinkling of innuendo, guilt by remote association, claims by anonymous
sources, and the like.

Some of the false charges are complex narrations built
up by layers added over the years, such as the following. In a story very
commonly repeated (a) some 1917 research by H.H. Goddard (not connected to
Pioneer) was falsely described (first by Kamin, 1974, and later by Gould, 1981)
as funding 80% of Jewish immigrants to be "feebleminded," (b) the
false version of Goddard's research was then falsely said (by Gould) to have
affected immigration legislation, (c) the false version was also falsely said
(by Miller, 1994, and by Lee, 1997) to have been included in the Congressional
testimony of Harry H. Laughlin of the Pioneer Fund, thus dragging Pioneer into
the tale, and (d) all this was then falsely said (by Tucker, 1994) to have
resulted in the return to death camps of refugees allegedly waiting in an
unidentified ship off the Florida coast. Tucker apparently was trying to insert
the voyage of the St. Louis into his false narrative. This oft-repeated
story, evolved from Kamin through Tucker, is false from beginning to end!

Fortunately, accurate accounts of these events are
readily available. Franz Samelson's 1975 review of Kamin's book in the journal Social
Research pointed out Kamin's errors (Samelson, 1975, 1982). Mark Snyderman
and the late Richard J. Herrnstein in 1983 in the American Psychologist (Snyderman
& Herrnstein, 1983) concurred with Samelson and added two further important
points: (1) early IQ testers did not argue that their empirical findings
supported restrictive immigration policies; and (2) the Congressional debates of
the time contain virtually no mention of IQ. Snyderman and Rothman (1988)
examined the same ground again. Biologist Bernard D. Davis in his 1986 book Storm
Over Biology (Davis, 1986; pp. 118-120) reviewed the Kamin and Gould
charges, and again found them not accurate. Seligman's (1992), book A
Question of Intelligence (pp. 128-130) and Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) The
Bell Curve (p. 5) provide more popular corrective treatments of the
issue, as does Rushton (1 997a,b). Simpler false charges leveled against
Pioneer alleged association with unnamed Nazis, funding of research to prove
white supremacy, advocating sterilization of black mothers on welfare, favoring
repatriation of blacks and the like. All untrue! For those who want more detail,
Pioneer has enumerated the most common false charges and answered them on the
Worldwide Web at www.pioneerfund.org, and readers are invited to look there.

It should be noted that some of the media acted in a
responsible manner when attention was called to errors. The New York Times (21
February 1996), the Wall Street Journal (9 January 1995 and 22 June
1999), and the Economist (24 January 1998), for example, promptly
published letters from this writer correcting the record. But others were
reluctant to "admit" error, and two of them -- the Sacramento Bee and
London's The Independent on Sunday -- required prodding by Pioneer's
lawyers before they would publish the correcting letters (9 March 1996 and 8
July 1990, respectively).

The media's false stories about Pioneer have found
their way into many archives, and a researcher might stumble across them by
computer searches or in person. Pioneer's denials, usually in letters from this
author, from Pioneer's counsel, or from scientists, are in the record also but
far more difficult to access. Even well intentioned academic figures have been
misled, while doing their research, into unknowingly repeating the false
charges, and sadly a few of these researchers refused later to retract the
falsehoods.

When Pioneer filed a formal complaint against a
professor of psychology and against his friend as an editor of the American
Journal of Psychology for refusing to retract falsehoods, the APA Office of
Ethics eventually replied with a letter to the effect that it had determined
that an ethics charge could not be opened against the two men, and that the
Office of Ethics's policy was not to disclose the reason (Carliner, 1997).
Although these two professors never made any retraction and, as far as this
writer knows, never were disciplined by the APA Office of Ethics, the American
Journal of Psychology, after separate negotiations, published a letter from
this writer correcting the falsehoods in part.

The truth is that Pioneer never has been in contact
with any Nazis. It has no political agenda, and has taken no positions. It does
not issue statements, or publish literature. Its sole activity except for the
Flanagan project in the 1930s has been to make hands-off grants to non-profit
institutions for unfettered research on projects suggested by the institutions
and for publication of the findings.

To be unmistakably clear, let me add that there are no
cleverly focussed answers in this editorial, nor any dissemblances, nor any
sophisms. I am saying flat out that Pioneer is not, and never has been, guilty
of any of these allegations.

THE PIONEER FUND IN FACT

Establishment

The Pioneer Fund was founded in 1937 by wealthy
investor Wickliffe Preston Draper and four other individuals interested in
genetics and evolution as the keys to understanding human nature, both the
similarities between individuals and groups and their differences. For the
ensuing 60 years, it has funded research on the nature of human nature -- the
hereditary basis of intelligence, personality, and social organization,
including both individual and group differences.

Qualifications of Scientists

In considering grant proposals, the Fund has always
sought excellence in the researchers, and checks new applicants as to scholastic
background, extent of field research, published writings and frequency of
citations of those writings, and reputation among peers. Pioneer grantees have
been recognized by their peers by being elected as the presidents of the
American Psychological Association, the British Psychological Association, the
Behavior Genetics Association, the Psychometric Society, the Society for
Psychophysiological Research, the American Educational Research Association, and
the National Council on Measurement of Education. One grantee had won a Nobel
prize, two are Guggenheim Fellows (one for doing Pioneer-funded work), and three
more were selected by the Galton Society of the United Kingdom to give the
annual Galton Lectures for 1983, 1995 (also on the basis of Pioneer-funded
work), and 1999 (based in part on Pioneer-funded work). Three were among the 11
recent biographees in the Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence, and 10 of
the articles in that two-volume work were written by grantees. Grantees have
served on the editorial boards of major academic journals, including three on
the board of Personality and Individual Differences and three more on the
editorial board of Intelligence.

Most of the Pioneer grantees hold Fellow status in one
or more of their respective scientific organizations, and many have won academic
honors for their research or other distinguished contributions from, among
others, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American
Educational Research Association, Mensa, Educational Testing Service, and the
American Psychological Association. In some cases Pioneer had funded the very
research for which the academic honors were awarded.

Thirty Pioneer grantees of recent times, in psychology
and other fields, have together published close to 200 scholarly books and 2000
scientific articles, mostly in the leading peer-reviewed journals, and these
passed review processes, involving hundreds of additional scientists.

Past Grants

The Fund has made grants to over 60 different
institutions located in eight countries, including some of the most prominent
universities in these countries. Some of these grantees have received, and still
do receive, annual grants sustaining ongoing programs. Although it has been
impossible to do justice here to all the discoveries made with the aid of
Pioneer funding, some of the most important have been highlighted at the
beginning of this editorial. All four of the scientific areas funded by Pioneer
-- behavioral genetics, intelligence, demographics, and racial variation -- were
actively avoided for a long time by larger foundations as too controversial, and
some of the research might never have been done but for Pioneer's funding.
Pioneer is proud of its success in helping to reshape the face of social science
and in helping to make mainstream again some important and previously tabooed
topics. This is the case in behavioral genetics and intelligence, where the
topics are mainstream today. But some topics in demographics and racial
variation are still highly politicized, making research sensitive.

The Fund's affairs are conducted directly by a five
person board of unrelated directors, all of whom have donated their time and
have not been compensated for their work as directors. All the 20 directors
since the Fund's incorporation in 1937, including its five founders, have been
executives, scientists, or professionals of some recognition in their fields.
None of them has any skeletons, big or small, in his or her closet to our
knowledge. All their names, and some identification, are on the Web site
mentioned above.

Operating Policies

With limited capital, not to be mentioned in the same
breath as the capital of Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie, the board members
decided early to run a tight ship, and ensure that as much as possible of the
available funds would go directly into research. To that end the Fund has never
had a paid staff and has never had an office of its own. Its mail goes to a P.O.
box, and its telephone listing is with an answering service. It owns no property
(except bank accounts in its name), not even a desk or typewriter, and its
letters and faxes originate from others' equipment. It is audited annually by a
major accounting firm to guarantee the integrity of its financial records.

The Fund's procedures are likewise kept simple. It
makes no grants to individuals but only to research institutions, including
universities. The Fund has no forms or specifications for grant applications,
but acts on letters from institutions briefly summarizing proposals and the
researchers' qualifications.

Various general policies were developed over the years
to keep the Fund on the "high road" and eliminate any grounds for
legitimate criticism. Moreover, the policies were designed to prevent even the
appearance of being able to influence scientists and, beyond that, to make the
grant conditions so sterile that any false charges of tampering would be
ridiculous on their face. These general policies were set out as follows in
several memos to directors.

# Make
grants to the best universities and research institutions, and avoid small
inexpert organizations.

# Deal
only with the top experts, and avoid contrarians who happen to be pursuing
similar research topics.

# Never
originate or suggest research projects, but merely accept or reject proposals
made by individual scholars in universities or research institutions.

# Avoid
actions that might appear to pressure a grantee. Do not request any reports or
accountings from scientists at universities, and require only the mandatory IRS
information from others.

# Reject
proposals that are peripheral to our main focus. Avoid advisors who advocate a
shift of focus.

# Avoid
taking policy positions. Leave to others the decisions on how to use the
research, and generally avoid grantees with social agendas to push.

# Avoid
arguments with or on behalf of ethnic, religious, or political groups. Let the
scientific results speak for themselves.

# Avoid
overhead buildup -- we're too small.

This editorial began by asking you to imagine what
contemporary social science would be like without any of the cutting-edge
research by Pioneer grantees. It then described some of the more outrageous
media attacks against the Pioneer Fund, and the scientists it has supported, and
told how the Fund operates.

Now this editorial will end by asking you to
contemplate the future of the behavioral sciences if the false charges the
popular media have made against the Pioneer Fund and Pioneer grantees were
allowed by Pioneer to stand, unquestioned and uncorrected, or if Pioneer were to
allow itself to be driven from its present fields and into some less
confrontational philanthropic area where it would not be a target. I think that,
from that point forward, some scientists would no longer be able to find
funding, either from Pioneer or from other grantors who would have been aware of
the Pioneer experience. Also, scientists doing research in any potentially
politically-sensitive area, be it psychology, behavioral genetics, or any field
that inquires into the nature of humankind and of human differences, might well
be the next names on the media's "blood sport" list. What is now
Pioneer's defense of itself, and of its grantees, might become your defense of
yourself. In many instances the science itself -- the research and the reporting
of the results -- might be stopped dead, or at least seriously curtailed because
of intimidation, lack of funding, or in some cases the chilling effect of hate
literature laws. Humankind, including you, would be the loser. The Twilight
Zone's politically correct supercomputer, or the media's simulation of it,
will have become a reality.

Although warnings are often voiced that research on
taboo topics such as intelligence, genetics, and race differences represents a
"slippery slope" toward evil social policies, it has been Pioneer's
position all along that a more dangerous slippery slope is one created by
substituting well-intentioned ignorance for knowledge humanely applied to the
solution of real human problems. Once such a slide begins, it tends to drag with
it ever-widening fields of critically needed research on the nature of mankind.